How DataXGen AI works

Start here

What DataXGen AI is

DataXGen AI is a business operating system you run by asking for things.

Most software gives you fixed screens and asks you to find what you need in them. DataXGen builds the screen you need, from your own data, when you ask — and then keeps it alive. The chart you asked for in March still shows June’s numbers in June, because it was never a picture of your data. It was a subscription to it.

Underneath it is a real double-entry accounting system, a flexible database for everything that is not accounting, and an AI — the Operator — that can read all of it, build on it, and once you have decided to let it, act on it.

What that looks like on a Tuesday

Who it is for

• Small and mid-sized businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but do not want an ERP project.
• Accountants and bookkeepers running several sets of client books side by side.
• Operators who are tired of exporting data to answer one question.

Start here

How your business fits inside it

There is one containment hierarchy and you will meet all of it in the first ten minutes. Nothing else to learn.

A Space also holds its pages, its automations and agents, its documents, and — if it keeps books — its ledger. That is the whole model. There is no separate “business” object hiding behind the Space you can see.

Two ways people organise it

• One business, several outlets: a parent Space per company, a child Space per location. Turn on consolidation and the parent adds up its children.
• A practice with clients: one Space per client, all side by side on Mission Control. Nothing leaks between them — a question asked inside one client’s books can only ever see that client’s books.

Start here

Four things worth knowing first

You do not need to understand how the product works to use it. But these four make everything else predictable, and they take two minutes.

1. Every number on screen is live

When the Operator builds you a chart it does not paste numbers into it — it attaches the chart to a query. What you see is whatever that query returns right now. Record a sale and the chart repaints, on your screen and your bookkeeper’s, with no refresh and without the AI running again. That is why dashboards here do not go stale, and why looking at one costs nothing.

2. The Operator cannot invent a number

A widget’s value slot only accepts a reference to a query. There is nowhere in it to put a literal. If the AI tried to write “revenue: 999,999” onto a card the system would not warn you — it would refuse to build the card. So the Operator can be wrong about what to show you. It cannot be wrong about what the number is.

3. Nothing writes without permission you gave it

Anything that changes your data — the Operator, an agent, an automation, an order arriving from your store — goes through the same gate. The first time it asks. As it gets things right you can let it do more, one category at a time. You can revoke that instantly, and irreversible things keep asking no matter how much you trust it.

4. It works with the AI switched off

Your books, records, dashboards, reports and automations all run with no AI configured at all. The AI is how you ask for things. It is not where your data lives or how it is calculated.

Start here

Your first day, end to end

1. 1

   She describes the business instead of filling a form

   On Mission Control she chooses “+ New Space” and types: “a café in Pune with three staff, we sell food and drinks and buy from four suppliers”. DataXGen sets up a chart of accounts for a food business, a Suppliers collection, a Sales collection and a starting board. Had her description been ambiguous, it would have offered a choice rather than picking one.

2. 2

   She gets last year in

   She drags her sales spreadsheet onto the Space. Each sheet becomes a collection, using the header row to name the fields. It is queryable immediately — no mapping screen.

3. 3

   She asks her first question

   Press ⌘K anywhere and type. She asks for revenue by month and gets a chart on her board. Next month it is already right, because it is bound to the data rather than drawn from it.

4. 4

   She adds her accountant

   Space settings → Members → invite, role “Accountant”. He can post journals and reconcile the bank; he cannot rearrange her boards.

5. 5

   She sets one thing to watch itself

   Operator → Watching → a check on overdue receivables, responding by asking permission. Now she finds out about overdue invoices without remembering to look.

Start here

What is in the product

A map. Each area has its own section, so read the row you need and skip the rest.

Set it up

Creating and organising Spaces

A Space is the first thing you make and the thing everything else goes inside. You create one by describing the business, not by filling in a form.

Creating one

1. 1

   Mission Control → + New Space

   Type a sentence about the business. “A café in Pune with three staff.” “A design agency billing monthly retainers.” “Rental kit for events — I need to track what is out.”

2. 2

   It sets up what fits

   A chart of accounts for that kind of business, the collections it will obviously need, and a starting board. A café gets suppliers and sales; an agency gets clients and retainers.

3. 3

   If it is not sure, it asks

   An ambiguous description gets you a choice between two or three sensible setups rather than a confident wrong guess. A description it cannot place at all gets you a blank Space, which is a perfectly good starting point.

Renaming, currency, icon

The gear in the top right → General. Currency is per Space, so a group with an Indian company and a UK one keeps both honest.

Groups, outlets and clients

Spaces nest. Add a sub-Space from the sidebar, and you get a tree — a holding company over three subsidiaries, a restaurant group over its locations, a practice over its clients.

• Turn on consolidation and a parent Space rolls up its children’s figures, live.
• Isolation is by Space, not by tree: asking a question inside one child cannot reach a sibling.
• You can move a Space under a different parent later without touching its data.

Pages inside a Space

Every Space starts with one board. Add more as tabs — a Suppliers page, a Calendar, a page per project — with “+ Page”, or by asking.

Deleting one

Settings → Danger. It asks you to confirm, and it takes the Space’s records, pages and documents with it. Exports (below) are the safety net worth taking first.

Set it up

Getting your data in

Four routes, and most businesses end up using three of them.

Saying it

Importing a spreadsheet

1. 1

   Drag the file onto the Space

   CSV or Excel. Several sheets in one workbook become several collections.

2. 2

   The header row becomes the fields

   Whatever your column headings say is what the fields are called. There is no mapping screen to sit through, and no invented column names.

3. 3

   Ask about it immediately

   It is a first-class collection the moment it lands — chartable, filterable, groupable.

Connecting a system

Gmail, Shopify, WooCommerce and Google Drive/Sheets keep feeding you after setup. Everything they bring is proposed for approval before it is written — covered under Connecting your other systems.

Bank statements

CSV and OFX import into the banking module, where you reconcile against what the books already say. Reconciliation posts the missing entries rather than just ticking rows.

Set it up

Files, uploads and the storage manager

Anything you upload is kept whole, read, indexed, and turned into something you can attach and ask about.

What happens to a file

• The original is stored untouched — you can always open exactly what was uploaded, not a re-rendered approximation of it.
• Its text is extracted (PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, images by OCR) so it is searchable.
• It becomes a record, which means you can attach it to an invoice, a supplier or a project.
• And it is indexed, so a question can reach inside it.

Filing

Documents, reports, forms, pages and uploads live in a folder tree belonging to the Space. One item has one home, so nothing appears twice and nothing is orphaned.

Storage limits

Space settings → Storage shows what this Space is using against your plan.

Getting everything out

A full workspace export gives you your schemas, records, journals, documents and even your dashboards, in open formats. Worth doing before anything irreversible, and worth knowing exists before you need it.

Set it up

Bringing your team in

Space settings → Members. Invite by email and pick a role. They see the same live boards you do, with the same numbers, at the same moment.

Roles are enforced on the server for every action, including approvals and anything the AI does on someone’s behalf. Asking the Operator to do something your role forbids does not work either — the check is on the action, not on the screen.

Run your business

Talking to the Operator

The Operator is the AI. You reach it from four places and they are all the same Operator with the same context.

Asking a question

Asking for something to look at

Changing what is already there

Asking why something happened

When it cannot do it

The second time you ask, it is free

The Operator recognises the shape of a request it has served before and rebuilds it without consulting a model at all. This is why the product does not get more expensive the more you use it — and why the same question is instant on the second Monday.

Run your business

Boards: building and managing them

A board is a page of live widgets. You edit it, and so does the Operator — you both produce the same kind of change, so both go in the same history with the same undo.

Adding a widget yourself

The Insert button lets you pick a widget type and then choose the data it should show. The list of data it offers is the list of things the system can actually answer — so it is impossible to build a card that shows nothing.

Adding one by asking

Rearranging

• Drag a card onto another to take its slot.
• You never set widths. You say what matters — this is a headline, these belong together — and the layout is worked out for you, which is why an AI-built board never arrives visually broken.
• Every move is an ordinary change, so it is in the activity feed and it is undoable.

Understanding a number you do not trust

Hover any widget and press “?”. The Operator tells you which query produced the figure and with what parameters. If the query is right and the number looks wrong, the underlying record is wrong — which is a much faster thing to discover than re-deriving the total by hand.

What you can put on a board

Run your business

Mission Control

The screen you land on after logging in. It is composed rather than fixed — a card per Space, a brief on what changed, the investigations you ran recently, and the omnibar.

• Each Space card leads with what that Space actually holds. A bookkeeping Space leads with cash; a Space that only holds project data leads with project numbers rather than a meaningless ₹0.
• “Jump back in” reopens a previous investigation instantly and for free, because it was stored as structure rather than as a screenshot.
• The card set varies over time, so the page does not become wallpaper you stop reading.

Your data

Creating and managing your own data

A collection is a table of your own design — Orders, Leads, Equipment, Patients, anything your business actually tracks. A record is one row.

Creating one by describing it

Adding records

• Type into the table — it is editable in place.
• Or tell the Operator: “add a Honda EU22i generator, serial 4471, ₹1,800 a day, good condition, in the depot”.
• Or import them in bulk.

Importing a spreadsheet

Drag a CSV or Excel file onto the Space. Each sheet becomes a collection and the header row names the fields. A file without a header row is refused rather than guessed at — inventing column names would give you a table nobody chose.

Asking about it

Your data

The books

Real double-entry bookkeeping, not a categorised list of transactions. Nothing posts unless it balances.

Recording things by saying them

Month end

On payroll tax

No tax rate is built in. You declare your own rules — percentage, banded or fixed, per side, on whichever base applies — and the engine applies exactly those, to the cent. A rate shipped by us and left un-updated one tax year would silently underpay people, so we ship none. A posted period is immutable and remembers the configuration it used, so history still explains itself after your rates change.

Reporting

Documents that stay true

A document here can hold ordinary paragraphs and real charts, tables and metrics — the same live widgets a board uses. A quarterly review written in March still shows March’s numbers in June, unless you deliberately froze it.

Writing one

Just type. “/” opens a menu for headings, lists, quotes, code — and for inserting data: a chart, a table, a metric. Inserted data is live, so the number in the paragraph and the number in the chart can never drift apart.

Getting the Operator to draft it

Working on it together

You, your teammates and the Operator can all edit the same document at once, and every change is attributed. The heads at the top show who is actually in the document right now.

Freezing it before you send it

“Issue” turns the document into an immutable, numbered artifact with every figure frozen at the value it had at that moment. Re-issuing creates a new version that supersedes the old one — the original keeps its number and its content forever, which is exactly what makes it usable as a record six months later.

Getting it out

PDF, DOCX, Markdown, plain text, and CSV for tables. Exporting a live document resolves its numbers as of now; exporting an issued one reproduces exactly what was issued, to the digit.

Reporting

Reports and board packs

Reports are documents with a print layout and a numbering series. Four standard definitions are built in, for the documents that have a right answer.

Instantiate one and it becomes an ordinary editable report — add your own sections, remove ones you do not use.

It is built to be printed

• Headings never strand at the bottom of a page, away from the section they introduce.
• Table headers repeat on every page a table spans — a column of figures with no headings on page two is unreadable.
• Rows never split across a page break.
• Figures right-align in tabular numerals, so the columns actually line up.

Producing it every month without doing anything

Point a schedule at the report and a cadence. Every run resolves the numbers fresh, freezes them, and files a numbered artifact — at zero AI cost, permanently. If a run fails it retries on the next tick rather than skipping the month, and deleting a schedule never deletes the reports it already produced.

Delegating work

Things that watch themselves

Two mechanisms, for two different jobs. Automations react to something happening — a record changing, a threshold crossed, a schedule firing. Standing checks watch a number and only act when it goes wrong.

Setting one up

Operator → Watching → new check. You choose what to watch (receivables ageing), the comparison (more than zero outstanding), how often, and what should happen when it trips.

What it costs to watch

Nothing. A check resolves one query and compares it to a threshold — no AI is consulted unless something has already gone wrong, and even then only to explain it. You can have as many as you like.

Delegating work

Agents: giving work to something

An agent is a named assistant you configure. No code, no prompt engineering — you fill in a form.

Collections            📮
  works in:    Sunrise Café
  may:         write records
  watches:     receivables past due
  reports to:  #ops
  budget:      $5 / month

Mention it in a thread and it answers as itself, not as the Operator.

How much it is allowed to do

Every actor starts at level 0 — it proposes, you decide. Five clean accepted proposals move it up a rung, for that kind of action, in that workspace. One correction moves it back down. You can grant or revoke a level yourself at any time, in Operator → Autonomy.

What it may spend

A budget binds before spending, not after. An agent that reaches its monthly limit stops using AI but keeps running its scheduled checks — a monitor that goes dark when it runs out of credit is worse than one that keeps watching for free. It tells you, too:

Teaching it

When the Operator builds something you will want again, save it as a skill. It replays at zero cost forever and belongs to the agent you saved it on — so “the weekly AR brief” becomes a thing Collections simply knows how to do.

Delegating work

Approving what it wants to do

When something wants to write and has not earned the right to do it unattended, you get an approval — in the thread where the work is happening, and in Operator → Approvals.

Three things that are always true

• Your role decides whether you can approve it, and that is checked on the server — not by hiding the button. A viewer can neither approve nor reject.
• Approvals expire. Approving a week-old proposal would be approving a snapshot of a situation that has moved on.
• “Approved” means the work happened. If the action fails, it says failed — it never reports success for something that did not run.

Delegating work

Missions: multi-step work

When a request takes several steps you get a Mission instead of a spinner.

The plan is shown before anything runs. Steps that only read run immediately; the first step that writes stops and waits for you. The status says which is happening — “waiting for your approval” is a different thing from “working”, and the card never blurs the two.

While it runs, and afterwards

• Each step shows its real state — nothing animates to look busy.
• When it finishes you get links to what it produced.
• Any step that can be undone has its own undo. You do not unwind the whole thing because step four was wrong.
• Cancelling stops the next step. It does not roll back completed work — pretending otherwise would lose work silently.

Connect & collaborate

Connecting your other systems

Everything arriving from outside is proposed, not written. An incoming order becomes a record you approve. Once you have trusted that kind of import a few times, it flows automatically — the same rule as everything else.

Setting one up

1. 1

   Integrations → Sources

   Pick the connector and fill in what it asks for. WordPress wants your site URL, a username and an application password — never your account password, and the site must be https, because that credential travels on every sync.

2. 2

   Paste the webhook URL

   Webhook-based connectors show you the exact URL to paste into the other system.

3. 3

   Watch the first arrivals

   Integrations → Arrivals shows what came in and what happened to it — including anything landed but not proposed, so nothing is silently lost.

Email has one extra rule

The sender must already be a contact, a member, or you. Email is the one channel anyone on earth can send to, so a message from an unknown sender is kept for you to look at but never turned into a proposal. Invoice details are read with pattern matching rather than AI, so a hostile email cannot talk the extractor into anything.

Letting an outside AI in

Integrations → Agent access issues a token for an MCP client — Claude, an IDE assistant, your own tooling. It reads what you can read and proposes changes, acting as you with your permissions, and its writes still wait for approval. Tokens are shown once, revocable instantly, and every call it makes appears in your activity feed.

Sending events out

Point your own systems at workspace events. Every delivery is signed so your receiver can prove it came from us, and an endpoint that keeps failing pauses itself with the reason visible rather than retrying into the void.

Connect & collaborate

Working with your team

Invite people in Space settings → Members and give each one a role.

Permissions are enforced on the server for every action, including approvals and anything the AI does on your behalf. A role that cannot do something cannot do it by any route — including by asking the Operator to do it instead.

The thread

Every Space has a conversation panel on the right. @someone notifies a teammate; @Operator asks the AI and the reply stays in the thread; @agent:name asks a specific agent. Approvals, Missions and issued reports post here too, so decisions live next to the conversation that produced them.

Who is here

The avatars in the top bar show who is actually looking at this board right now. Teammates who are members but not currently here are dimmed rather than removed.

No notification spam

Routine work — a page created, a widget added — is a silent entry in the activity feed. Notifications are reserved for things that genuinely need you: an approval, an anomaly, a failed payment, a due reminder.

Connect & collaborate

Installing a whole vertical

A pack installs a working setup into a Space: collections, boards, automations, a starting agent, and a set of questions that already work at zero cost.

Packs build on what is already there rather than duplicating it — installing CRM onto a Space that already has a contacts list adopts that list instead of refusing or creating a second one. Uninstalling removes what the pack added and leaves what was yours.

Reference

Recipes

1. 1

   Get a dashboard for a business you just added

   Open the Space — it already has a starting board. Then ask for what is missing: “add cash runway and top five customers”.

2. 2

   Find out why a number moved

   Ask “why did revenue drop last month?”. You get an investigation — trend, breakdown, movers, records — not one chart and a paragraph.

3. 3

   Turn a spreadsheet into something you can question

   Drag the file onto a Space, then ask about it directly: “orders by status”.

4. 4

   Produce a board pack every month

   Documents → new report → Board pack. Adjust the sections, then schedule it for the 1st. Every run files a numbered PDF at zero AI cost.

5. 5

   Chase overdue invoices without remembering to

   Operator → Watching → a check on receivables ageing, responding by asking permission. After you have approved a few, raise its autonomy if you want it to stop asking.

6. 6

   Let your accountant in without letting them rearrange things

   Invite them as Accountant. They get the books; your pages stay yours.

7. 7

   Give Claude access to your workspace

   Integrations → Agent access → create a token, and paste it into your MCP client. It reads what you read; its writes wait for you.

8. 8

   Undo something the Operator did

   Open the activity feed. Every change carries an actor, a reason and an undo — no matter who or what made it.

Reference

When something looks wrong

Reference

Your data and who can see it

• Your data trains nothing outside your workspace. What the system learns — which questions you ask, which layouts you keep — stays in your tenant. What crosses tenants is anonymised structure, never content.
• Isolation is tested, not assumed: a test plants content in one tenant and asserts it can never surface in another’s context, search or dashboards.
• The AI cannot forge a figure. Over a thousand adversarial attempts to make the interface display a number no query produced run on every build. None succeed.
• Untrusted content cannot give instructions. Documents, imported rows and forwarded emails are handled so their text can never be read as a command, and anything sent outward can only reach people already in your workspace.
• Backups are drilled, not just taken. Point-in-time recovery runs continuously and a restore is rehearsed on a schedule against real data — an untested backup is a rumour.
• You can take your data out: a full export gives you your schemas, records, journals, documents and even your dashboards, in open formats.
• Credentials are encrypted at rest and never returned by any API once saved — a connector shows you that a key exists, never the key.

Reference

Plans and usage

Three plans — Starter, Growth and Scale — differing in how many Spaces and members you get, and in AI usage. Current pricing is on the home page; this guide does not repeat numbers that could go stale.

A trial runs first. When it ends there is a grace period before anything pauses, and nothing is deleted — restoring a paused workspace brings everything back exactly as it was. Usage and remaining credits are in Settings → Usage.

Reference

Glossary